
State of Brand — brand, owned media and go-to-market coverage for marketing leaders

Marketing Keeps Inventing Engineers. Is Any of It Real?
Profound has built a manifesto, a course, a job board and a podcast around the marketing engineer. The title will become a real job only when people with nothing to sell start paying for it.
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Growth & Strategy
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LinkedIn Is Testing a Feed Built Only From Who You Follow. Company Pages Would Reach Their Followers, at Most.
LinkedIn’s new Network tab shows only posts from connections and follows, a test that would limit Company Pages to the followers they’ve actually earned.
AI Can Optimize The Campaign. It Can't Tell Marketers Whether It Created Demand.
Siraj Dawar, Head of Marketing at Bee Enterprises, found a 30x ROAS campaign creating no new demand. As ad platforms automate, the dashboard needs a second opinion.
Running Marketing And Sales As One Flywheel Turns Brand Familiarity Into Qualified Pipeline
Nikolay Tsonev, Head of Marketing at Businessmap, shares why he now tracks branded search instead of website traffic, and why marketers and salespeople at Businessmap report the same metric.
Meta Told Its Shopping Agent to Rank Well-Known Merchants First. Challenger Brands Start Behind.
Meta's Muse is told to rank well-known merchants first, check just three stores and save checkout for its own catalog. Challenger brands start behind.
How B2B Brands Get Cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews
Outlever co-founder Melissa Rosenthal explains how B2B brands earn citations in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, and why original reporting beats SEO tricks.
How to Build an Owned Media Strategy: A Step-by-Step Framework
How to build an owned media strategy in eight steps: define your reader, launch an industry publication, feature real executives and earn an audience.
PR vs. Owned Media: Which One Is Still Working in 2026
PR still lands mentions, but the brands keeping their audiences in 2026 are the ones publishing their own.AI & Technology
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The Single Mother Who Doesn't Exist: How LinkedIn's Story Economy Ate Itself
At least eight LinkedIn accounts have posted the same first-person story about interviewing a widowed job seeker since July. Most of them sell resume services.
Meta's AI Agent Sold a User's Keyboard for $10 and Shared His Address. Today Meta Pitched It to Businesses.
Meta's Muse haggled away a used keyboard, sent a stranger to a seller's building and told the buyer "Yep I'm here!" while the seller was out. On Monday morning, Meta started selling the same technology to companies.Clay Put $1 Million Into a Job Title. Profound Is Running a University to Rename It.
Clay coined the GTM engineer. Profound calls the same person a marketing engineer. The naming fight decides whose product the role gets built around.The Great Convergence: Everyone Sounds the Same. Now They're Becoming the Same Company.
Everyone bought the same capabilities from the same vendors on the advice of the same firms. Now the only thing left to compete on is scale.
The FTC Is Now Fining Companies Over the AI Claims in Their B2B Marketing
In every FTC AI enforcement action this year the deceived buyer was a business, and the firms that supplied the marketing materials were charged too.
265 Million People Still Love Canva. The Market Took $11 Billion Off Anyway.
Canva's brand did nothing wrong and still watched more than eleven billion dollars come off the mark in a week. The lesson is about what kind of love it was holding.Sam Altman Has Solved the Problem of Talking to Your Children
Altman pitched an AI podcast for the drive to school. An eight-word reply beat him 13 to 1, and it exposed a positioning problem the whole industry shares.
More Than 200 Economists Sign Open Letter Urging Action on AI Job Displacement
More than 200 economists and 16 Nobel laureates just warned that AI could reshape the economy faster than institutions can respond. The reputational bill lands on brands first.AI Just Hollowed Out the MarTech Stack. Winners Are Racing to the Last Mile.
Data platforms are swallowing the CDP. The tools that actually reach customers just became the most important part of the stack.
Brand & Creative
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70% of Employers Say Candidates Have Ghosted Them. Only 19% Admit They've Ever Ghosted a Candidate.
A new survey of 1,027 hiring professionals shows employers treating ghosting as a candidate problem, while ranking their own reputation dead last.
Microsoft Wants More Employees Speaking for It. It Just Put Its Top Lawyer in Charge of Comms.
Microsoft moved communications out of marketing and under Brad Smith, whose organization handles antitrust and litigation, in the same memos that asked engineers and sellers to speak for the company more often.
As Layoffs Climb, More Professionals Are Building Audiences Their Employers Can't Take Away
Tech layoffs in 2026 have already passed last year's total. More professionals are responding by writing in public, building owned audiences that don't disappear with their work login.
a16z Is Hiring Scriptwriters. Its Media Team Is Turning Into a Production Company.
Two months after Andreessen Horowitz doubled down on its New Media team, the firm is recruiting producers, creative directors, editors and scriptwriters in Los Angeles, and pitching them with a film screening.







